I was thinking about biscotti the other day and how I haven’t made it in at least two years – I was definitely still in pastry school the last time. I remembered that it wasn’t the hardest thing to make, but it also wasn’t the simplest. So, I whipped out my old test book, and searched for the recipe.
It was definitely something I could do, but this recipe was for almond biscotti. And I really wanted to try a more seasonal flavor. I’ve been on a pumpkin rampage, and I still am, so I thought I’d give the old internet a search, and see if I could find a pumpkin biscotti recipe that suited my needs. I quickly came across this one on simplyrecipes.com. It was from 2007, but in the world of baking, that really doesn’t matter – a good recipe is a good recipe, pretty much forever. So I went to work.
I followed the recipe pretty closely – except that I tried to cheat and not flour my hands when I went to knead the dough – HUGE mistake. This dough is über sticky – make sure you use plenty o’ flour. It makes rolling it into a large log that much easier.
biscotti log (sort of)
The one thing about this recipe I did find momentarily confusing was that it says to roll it into a large log, but that the logs should be relatively flat. Well, in my mind, a log is round, not flat, so I didn’t quite understand at first what this was telling me to do. So, I thought back to the last time I made biscotti, and just did that, which was just make a long flat-ish dough strip (as you can see in the picture), and bake it the first time in that shape.
As biscotti means “twice baked” in Italian, you gotta bake this puppy twice. So, after it baked as a flat log, I removed it from the oven, turned the heat down, waited for the log to cool slightly, then cut it into strips, and baked it again.
baking twice makes it extra nice.
So, here’s where my personal preference came into play. I don’t like my biscotti super hard and stale-tasting. I like it crispy on the edges, but still a little soft in the middle. So, I baked it the second time just long enough to achieve my desired results, which was somewhere around 7-8 minutes.
crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside.
Someone told me that although it tasted fantastic, it wasn’t biscotti because it wasn’t hard enough. Well, friends, that’s just not true. Biscotti can be as hard as you like it – the only requirement is that you bake it twice. You know, since that’s what it’s named for, and all. 🙂
Small Indulgences 